Saturday, June 2, 2012

There are some ideas of pictures that you always keep in your mind and never take. You just think always "next time", because it is so easy and everywhere, and this "next time" might never come.
The yellow fields that are everywhere in this time of the year were for me one of these ideas...

So, finally I did it.. I took some pictures of these bright yellow fields. And actually, considering the weather conditions, it appeared to be not that straightforward...

Though the weather was very good for such scenery, there were certain factors that made it a little bit complicated to take the shots I wanted.

First of all, though it was a day time, there was not enough light to use lowest possible ISO. So, I had to increase at first to ISO 200, and then finally to ISO 320.

24mm; f/22; 1/60 sec; ISO 320

Secondly, I had to wait and quickly react, when sun suddenly came out of the cloud, because then the color of the field and the juxtaposion of the field and the sky was the best.

68mm; f/22; 1/60 sec; ISO 320

And the main problem was, that though I was using tripod, I could not go down to very low shutter speed, because it was very windy, and to maintain the focus I had to go down to not more than 1/60 sec. I didn't want to increase aperture too much, so that depth of field was enough for this kind of picture. In other words, I just wanted all these yellow flowers through the whole picture stay in focus area.

12mm; f/20; 1/80 sec; ISO 320

For the last shot it was a compromise, where I went down to f/20, because I was not using tripod there.

In general - I like the colors, I like these little yellow flowers and contrast against the cloudy sky. This is one of the good things about summer - you can find a lot of colors everywhere.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

After finishing the Art of Photography course, I was looking for some topics that were not covered by the course materials. One of them that I found especially interesting was night photography on longer shutter speed.

I wanted to take some pictures of traffic streams, that would show the lights of cars in both directions - white and red colors. However, it appeared to be quite difficult to find appropriate point to take such pictures. In ideal situation this kind of shots should be taken on some distance from the road and preferably the road should turn and have nice background to result in a balanced composition. The other difficulty that I found in Tallinn was to find busy road with tight cars streams in both directions (to have the white and red color lines of the same density. It is getting dark at around 20.00 a.m. now in Tallinn and the roads are not busy at all at this time.

However, I accidentally found and interesting subject to experiment on - trams. And the place where the trams are turning. Here are some of my attempts of taking pictures of trams on longer shutter speed.

Three of them I have turned into black and white, because they create some special mood without other colors.

55mm; f/9.0; 8 sec; ISO100

...On slightly longer focal distance of 80mm:

80mm; f/9.0; 8 sec; ISO100

...With slightly different composition...

80mm; f/9.0; 8 sec; ISO100

... and tram moving in different direction, which allowed to take picture of front orange light...

80mm; f/9.0; 8 sec; ISO100

I do not give up to find a proper location to take pictures of front and back car lights. Next time...